


the finish line

by tidesong



Category: The Poppy War - R. F. Kuang
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Post-Canon, Relationship Study, post tbg, tbg spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:22:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27682142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tidesong/pseuds/tidesong
Summary: So this was how it felt to be burned by the sun.—Nezha is haunted by someone who's not very good at staying away.
Relationships: Fang Runin/Yin Nezha
Comments: 24
Kudos: 81





	the finish line

**Author's Note:**

> all mistakes are mine, i'm still a mess

The first time he sees her, he’s convinced that it’s just a bad dream. 

Rin is walking around his room like she has every right to be there, rummaging through his cabinets and rearranging his belongings as if his organizational skills had personally offended her. The air shimmers around her wherever she goes, footprints leaving a trail of embers in her wake. 

“You should be dead,” he snarls, or wants to, because what actually comes out of his mouth is a half-choked cry, muffled by the lump in his throat. 

She picks up one of his silk robes, draped across his chair in the far corner of the room.

“So this was how you lived?” Rin asks, holding it against her body before trying it on. “No wonder you were so cranky at Sinegard.”

“You should be dead,” he tries again, because if she thinks she can just waltz back in three months after she’d taken his hand and forced his dagger into her heart, she had another thing coming.

Rin finally stops her pacing and walks over until she’s right in front of him. She looks the same as ever, small and proud and angry, mouth set in a hard line. He can feel the heat radiating off of her in waves. _Do I look dead to you?_ she seems to say. _Too bad I’m not very good at being gone_.

“Oh, Nezha,'' she sighs, almost pitying in tone. “We’re not done yet.” 

And before he can ask what she meant by that, Rin knocks over the lamp on his nightstand in one fluid motion. He can only watch as flames spread across the floor, spiraling into a blazing inferno that turns the whole world red. 

Nezha wakes up with the smell of smoke in the air and the taste of ash in his mouth. 

* * *

The second time he sees her, she steals the question right out of his mouth before he can even ask. They’re walking on the docks of Khurdalain, foggy morning light enveloping everything in the distance in shades of gray. 

“You’re not crazy,” Rin informs him over the sound of waves crashing onto shore. “But if you were,” she continues viciously, mouth twisting into a sneer, “this is a much better sign of insanity, don’t you think? Better than hearing a god all the time in your head.”

“You were a god once,” Nezha counters, meeting her jab with one of his own. “But that didn’t work out very well for you, did it?”

“I’m still dead,” she continues as if he hadn’t spoken, “if that’s what you’re worried about.” Rin regards him with a sharp, piercing gaze. He’d forgotten how she could cut him open with a single look. “Why? Scared that I’ll come back and burn it all down again?”

 _You don’t know the half of it_ , he wants to say but doesn’t. _You don’t know how much I feared you, hated you, loved you until I didn’t have a name for what I felt for you_. 

* * *

The third time he sees her, she tells him a story.

“There was nothing I wasn’t willing to do,” she admits. “But you already knew that.”

Nezha lets her talk. He’d welcomed her honesty when it counted. He figures that it doesn’t really matter now, not when they’re just two lost souls wandering the dreamscape, walking nowhere and everywhere without a single destination in mind.

“I’m not sorry,” she continues, “for any of it. I killed to the point where there was nothing else, until I didn’t have room for anything else.”

 _Speerlies are made of sharp and wicked things_ , his brother had said once upon a time. _They leave a path of wreckage behind them, smiling all the way._ He remembers the way people had called her a monster behind her back even when she was the only saving grace for this broken, bleeding nation. But above it all, he’s ashamed that he’d once thought that about her, too. 

“How are you supposed to know the price of everything,” she asks, suddenly serious, “when all you had was nothing?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, knowing that she wouldn’t accept anything but the truth. “Because it wouldn’t have changed anything.”

Rin stops walking so abruptly that he nearly trips into her. She turns to him, fixing her gaze to his. Her eyes glitter like twin pools of fire and he can feel the gravity of her stare pulling him in as if he could ever look away.

“I still hear them, you know. The ghosts of Speer and everyone else that came before. Sometimes, if I concentrate hard enough, I can still hear the Phoenix.” She pauses, looking out into the distance at only something she could see. “Or maybe that’s just me. I didn’t get a chance to know what peace was, you know. All I knew was war.”

“Is that what you’ve come to tell me?” Nezha finally asks. “Are we just trading secrets now?”

Rin laughs. It’s a sharp, bitter sound, ringing hollow in his ears. 

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” she says, stepping closer to him until she’s the only thing in his line of sight. “You just need to learn how to listen.” 

* * *

The fourth time he sees her, he tries to kill her. 

Nezha’s not sure if such an act was even possible— _because how do you even kill someone who was already dead_ —but if he’s sure of one thing, it’s that he wants her gone. He’s tired of being haunted by the ghost of a girl who was just as infuriating and destructive in death as in life. 

“What do you want?” Nezha snaps, hands curling into fists. She dances away from his swings, mouth twisting in a wicked grin as she sidesteps one hit after another. 

“Oh, this isn’t about what _I_ want,” she says just as he lunges for her. 

They fight on the shores of Lake Boyang, trading blows like there was no tomorrow. He’s far too intent on driving Rin towards the water before he remembers that he can’t wield his power the way he used to. 

The split second of realization is all Rin needs when she holds him down in the water with one hand, fingers glowing red-hot around his throat. 

“I’ll tell you a secret,” she says when she finally pulls him out. He is still choking and spluttering on the sand when she leans over him, mouth right next to his ear. “If you really want me gone, you just have to let me go.”

When he wakes, he can still feel the heat on his wrists, arms, neck, and throat. The skin is raw and tender for the rest of the week; he slathers ointments and bandages the angry red burn marks but if anything, that seemed to aggravate them even more. He recognizes it as her own personal brand, a simple reminder that said, _I’m not going anywhere_. 

_Neither am I_ , he thinks as he soaks his hands in ice-cold water in the middle of winter.

When the wounds finally heal, he finds that the new skin is darker and tanner, stretched out over flesh and bone like paper that’s been worn too thin. 

He examines himself in the mirror, realizing that the color looks just like— 

Nezha walks back to his bed in a daze. _So this is it_ , he thinks, _this was how it felt to be burned by the sun_. 

* * *

The fifth time he sees her, he doesn’t stop trying. 

He throws things at her. He throws anything he can grab with his hands, anything he can conjure up in the dreamscape. She always catches them in mid-air but he wonders if they would pass through her or if they would incinerate the second they made contact with her skin, the same way she’d done with everything she’d ever touched. One time he hurls a knife towards her but she simply catches it by the blade, ignoring the blood that trails down her palms. She’d given him a long, measured look as if to say, _try harder next time_. 

Nezha barely has time to blink before she launches herself at him, a whirlwind of fire and fury. 

There’s a sharp crack to the back of his head and he is drifting in darkness again, floating and spiraling down into the night. 

* * *

The sixth time he sees her, Nezha snaps.

He curses her name until he’s out of breath and says all sorts of dreadful things that he regrets the second they’re out of his mouth. 

The whole time Rin doesn’t say a thing. Just watches as he rages, conjuring up storms in the dreamscape, leaving devastation in his wake. How ironic, that someone who was never the poster child for self-control was now the epitome of patience. 

“You’re everywhere,” he screams over the sound of thunder. “You come and tell me all of these things like you’re doing me a favor even though I’ve been fine all of these months. Then you show up and you’re judging me because you have nothing else better to do—”

He doesn’t understand why she’s still standing there, calm as ever, right in the eye of all of his storms. Nezha wants to feel her rage because that was better than not feeling anything from her at all. If anything, her indifference makes him angrier.

“You have no right to any of this.” His breath comes in short, angry pants. “It wasn’t supposed to end like this. You wanted me to keep living, but then you couldn’t even take your own advice in the end.”

 _This isn’t fair_ , he thinks, and maybe he says it out loud because he can see her shake her head out of the corner of his eye.

“None of it is,” Rin says evenly. “So don’t forget why you killed me,” she reminds him, softer this time. “It was the only way forward.”

“You have no idea what it's like,” he snarls, and maybe it doesn’t sound so terrifying because his voice _fucking breaks_ in the middle. “And if you think for one second—”

“Go on,” she says, not a hint of ridicule in her voice. Around them, his storm rages on. “Say what you’ve been meaning to say. Don’t hold back. You've earned at least that much.”

The next time she speaks, he hears it in his mind and feels it down to his bones. _It’s always harder to keep living_. 

* * *

The seventh time he sees her, she has both of her hands. It’s a sad day when the first thing he thinks is, _she can kill me with both of her hands now_.

“You can do anything when you’re dead,” Rin tells him when she notices his stare. “You should try it sometime.”

“Fuck you,” he mutters, more on instinct than anything else. 

She taps her chin, the barest hint of a smile flickering across her face. “That can be arranged. I have all the time in the world now.”

He snorts. “I’m not going to wonder about the specifics of that.”

They’re sitting together at the very end of the pier in Arlong, right at his favorite spot by the river. The late afternoon sun burns bright above their heads and he takes a minute to enjoy the way sunlight reflected off the water, casting a golden sheen across the surface.

“Do you think about who we would be without war?” Nezha asks after a period of silence. 

“No,” she answers simply. “Because without it, I don’t have anything else.”

“But don’t you ever wonder?” he presses. “Don’t you think about how everything could’ve been avoided and we were still enemies?”

Rin shrugs, flicking water with her feet. The river ripples, scattering light in all directions. “Being enemies already sounds like a war, don’t you think?”

There’s an emotion in his chest that Nezha can’t name. It feels a lot like regret.

* * *

The eighth time he sees her, he listens. 

_You asked me if I ever wondered about who I would be without the war. I told you that I didn’t, but it was only half of the truth. I don’t have to wonder because the truth is that I already know, and I told myself I would rather die than to be that girl again._

_When I was fourteen, I was promised to a merchant who was three times my age and had been married twice before. It was the only future for a people on the bottom of society, for war orphans and girls with skin as dark as mine. You can imagine how that was supposed to go: spread my legs, have some sons, and serve a husband who would hold power over me. So I hedged all my bets on the Keju and well, you can say the rest is history._

_I used to think that I knew the moment in time where it all went wrong—now I'm not so sure anymore. Was it when I called on the Pantheon and felt the Phoenix for the first time? Was it when I wiped one country off the map? Was it when I traded one death for another? Was it when I burned away the rest of my humanity and replaced it with madness?_

_I told you that I wasn’t sorry for any of it, and I meant it. I gave the Federation the same end that they gave Speer. I did it for every Speerly man, woman, and child who’d burned to ashes on the pyre that night. I evened the odds for the first time because sometimes when there’s no justice to be found you have to settle for vengeance, and vengeance is a different kind of hunger all together. It’s right up there with hate; the two burn twice as hot together. And if you didn’t have hope but you had hate, well, what was the difference?_

_This is the part where Kitay would tell me that I’m diverging from the point. But the thing is, the war gave me power, and being drunk off power is a different kind of addiction._

_I swore I wouldn’t be that helpless girl again and I was willing to watch the world burn before I lost any of it._

_The most important lesson I learned did not come from Sinegard. No one ever talked about the difference between trust and loyalty. War makes liars out of the best of us, and I don’t need anyone to tell me how I’d been betrayed by so many people—I’ll never be sorry about your father, by the way—and so blinded that I never stopped to think about how was I supposed to win a war that had been decades in the making and played on a far grander scale than I could never grasp until those final moments._

_You should know by now that history moves in cycles. There are no real winners in war; just the ones who know how to survive._

_So maybe you could be the one who fixes things. You owe it to me to try, anyway. But I think you can do me one better—and if you have any faith left in me at all, I think that you could also be the one who can move on from surviving and start living._

_You could be the one who crosses the finish line._

* * *

The next time he sees her, it feels like the last. 

Rin is standing on the blackened sands on Speer with her back turned to him, staring into the horizon. The sky is a shade of inky twilight, streaked by the faintest light of dawn.

“Congratulations are in order, I suppose,” she says without turning around. “You did what I never could. Now you can have your republic and everything you’ve ever wanted.”

 _Everything_ , he thinks, _but not you_. 

“Will you rule?” Rin asks, voice barely louder than a whisper. “Or will you ruin?”

“I bled for Nikan as much as you.” _And then some_ , he adds silently. That much is true—she might’ve burned the way forward for him, but he’d picked up the mantle right after her and had been holding onto his promise of fixing things.

“You never asked me why.” There are less than three feet between them but somehow she still sounds like she’s an ocean away. “You asked me what I wanted every time you saw me, but you never asked me why.”

His throat is dry when he swallows. “Why, then?”

“There were still things that you needed to hear. Call it catharsis, if you will. And because maybe, _just maybe_ , some part of me wanted to see you through.” 

It’s not atonement and it’s the furthest thing from forgiveness but it’s the closest they could ever get to it so he takes it. He’ll take anything she has to offer these days. He remembers something she’d told him once, a memory resurfacing like an echo from another lifetime: _if you really want me gone, you just have to let me go_. 

“Rin,” he says to half-kept secrets and ghosts. 

And finally, _finally_ , when she turns around and he’s looking at that heartbreaking, terrible face—

Nezha reaches for her, an act that he’s done a handful of times in the past but somehow had never felt so honest until now. Her hand is warm, solid underneath his touch and she doesn’t say anything when he intertwines his fingers with hers. Above them, the stars blink out of existence and Nezha closes his eyes, letting the dawn light everything up from the inside. 

He sits next to her, shoulder to shoulder on the ruins of Speer, face turned towards the horizon.

They watch the sun rise. 


End file.
